Bucking E.U. Tide, Italians Endorse Prime Minister

ROME — If there was one bright spot for mainstream political parties in the elections for the European Parliament, it came, to the surprise of many, in Italy, where Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his Democratic Party received more than 40 percent of votes cast, a level no party has reached in any Italian election since 1958.

Mr. Renzi, who ran on a pro-Europe, anti-austerity platform, easily beat his principal opponents, receiving roughly double the votes cast for the anti-establishment party of Beppe Grillo or for the party of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who campaigned assiduously despite the restrictions imposed by a one-year sentence he is serving under house arrest.

The vote strengthened Mr. Renzi’s resolve — and his clout — to push through a contested agenda in Italy. Analysts said it also seemed to show that voters were willing to reward established parties that initiate changes themselves, without the prodding of the political extremes.

“Italy was the country where anything could have happened, instead it became the place that sent a most surprising message of hope,” Mr. Renzi told reporters at a news conference in Rome on Monday. Italy would work from this mandate, he said, to “change the setup of Europe and the approach that Europe has had all these years.”

The choices that the European Union will have to make after the elections do not depend on nationalities, he said, but on a shared vision of Europe. “We have greater ambitions, we want to lower the tones and raise ambitions,” he said. “We have to help Europe change.”

The shared vision should be a middle ground between the “restoration” of an idea of Europe “that has not worked, that has failed,” and populism, he continued.

Actually, European issues had often receded into the background during the hard-fought campaign in Italy that tested the staying power of the coalition government against that of emerging parties, like the Five Star Movement of Mr. Grillo and the conservative forces of Mr. Berlusconi.

Analysts like Roberto D’Alimonte, who teaches Italian politics at the Guido Carli Free International University for Social Studies in Rome, saw the vote as a mandate for Mr. Renzi to push through the political and economic changes he has promised since he took power in February.

The vote “is a message to go ahead, do what you promised to do, bring about change,” he said. “This is a vote for change, not the kind of change that Grillo advocated — wiping the slate clean — not radical change, but change.”

Mr. Renzi quickly rose to the fore of Italian politics by pledging to enact far-reaching changes that aim to lift the economy and renovate the country’s sclerotic political and bureaucratic structures. “People believe in what he’s doing,” Mr. D’Alimonte said. “They’re giving him a line of credit. They’ve perceived that there is widespread resistance to the kind of change he has promised, and they’re saying ‘we’re behind you.' ”

Mr. Renzi signaled Monday that the message had been received.

“We know this vote is for an Italy that wants to change,” he said, and the result “has removed all alibis” for those in power.

He continued: “There is no room to put off reforms, be they institutional, constitutional, electoral, or dealing with labor, public administration, justice or taxes.”

The Democratic Party drew 2.5 million more votes in these elections than it had in national elections last year, Mr. D’Alimonte said. “In other parts of Europe, government parties — even Merkel — lost votes,” he said, referring to the German chancellor. “This is a party in government that gained in difficult circumstances. Italians have decided to trust Renzi.”

Voter turnout in Italy was 58.7 percent, eight percentage points lower than in the last European elections, when voting was held over two days, but still higher than expected.

The center-left had a strong showing in many local elections, too. With votes still being counted, it was leading in regional elections in Piedmont and Abruzzo, taking the lead in more than a dozen municipal elections, and had won some cities — including Florence and Modena — outright.

The showing below 17 percent for Forza Italia, the center-right party Mr. Berlusconi founded 20 years ago, echoes his waning political fortunes, which were exacerbated by his conviction last year of tax fraud. He is serving a year under house arrest, and began public service this month working with Alzheimer’s patients outside Milan.

Nevertheless, Mr. Berlusconi wrote on his Facebook page on Monday that Forza Italia remained “the irreplaceable keystone of the center-right, the axis around which to reconstruct a coalition” for the next elections. He acknowledged, however, that his party “had a result inferior to my expectations.”

The other big loser was Mr. Grillo, who had said repeatedly during the campaign that he would step down if the Five Star Movement did not do better than in national elections last year, when it received 25 percent of the vote. It received just over 21 percent of the vote on Sunday.

“It wasn’t a defeat, we went beyond defeat,” Mr. Grillo said in a video posted on his website. But the Five Star Movement, he said, remained the chief opposition party and the second party in the country.

Anti-European sentiment did not find a firm hold among those who voted, though the Northern League, the anti-immigrant party that put anti-Europeanism at the core of its campaign, received 6.2 percent of the vote. It was a better result than expected given recent scandals within the party.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated, at one point, the surname of the leader of the Five Star Movement. He is Beppe Grillo, not Mr. Beppo.